Six Women Scholars Honored With Major Awards

Ruth Murray-Clay, an assistant professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been selected to receive the 2015 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy from the American Astronomical Society for her work on theoretical studies of star and planet formation.

Dr. Murray-Clay is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Anna M. Cienciala, professor emerita of history and Russian and East European studies at the University of Kansas, died on December 24. She is being honored posthumously with the Commander’s Cross, the second highest honor bestowed by the government of her native Poland. She was honored for her scholarship on Polish history. Dr. Cienciala was the co-editor of Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (Yale University Press, 2008).

Professor Cienciala joined the faculty at the University of Kansas in 1965 and continued to serve on the faculty there until her retirement in 2002. She was a graduate of the University of Liverpool in England. She earned a master’s degree at McGill University in Montreal and a Ph.D. at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Dorothy Roberts, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has been selected to receive the 2015 Solomon Carter Fuller Award from the American Psychiatric Association. Professor Roberts is the author of several books including Sex, Power, and Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond (Ian Randle Publishers, 2009).

Before joining the Penn faculty in 2012, Professor Roberts taught for 14 years at the Northwestern University School of Law. She is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School.

Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate and professor emerita at Princeton University, has been selected to receive the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. She will be honored at the annual awards gala in New York City on March 12.

Professor Morrison joined the faculty at Princeton in 1989. Previously, she taught at the University at Albany of the State University of New York System and had been an editor at Random House for 20 years.

K. Paige Carmichael, a professor of veterinary pathology at the University of Georgia is the recipient of the 2015 Iverson Bell Award from the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges. The award recognizes leadership and the promotion of diversity in veterinary medical education.

Dr. Carmichael joined the faculty at the University of Georgia in 1993. She earned her doctorate in veterinary medicine at Tuskegee University in Alabama and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia.

Susan Kidwell, the William Rainey Harper Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, has received the 2015 Mary Clark Thompson Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. The award, given every three years, honored Dr. Kidwell’s “groundbreaking work on fossil preservation.”

Dr. Kidwell joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1985. She is a graduate of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics from Yale University.